Search Results: "kula"

24 May 2020

I recently found a few PDFs which I was unable to print due to
those files causing insufficient printer memory
errors:
I found a detailed
explanation
of what might be causing this which pointed the finger at transparent
images, a PDF 1.4 feature which apparently requires a more recent version of
PostScript than what my printer
supports.
Using Okular's Force rasterization option
(accessible via the print dialog) does work by essentially rendering
everything ahead of time and outputing a big image to be sent to the
printer. The quality is not very good however.

Converting a PDF to DjVu
The best solution I found makes use of a
different file format: .djvu
Such files are not PDFs, but can still be opened in Evince and
Okular, as well as in the dedicated
DjVuLibre application.
As an example, I was unable to print page 11 of this
paper. Using pdfinfo, I found that
it is in PDF 1.5 format and so the transparency effects could be the cause
of the out-of-memory printer error.
Here's how I converted it to a high-quality DjVu file I could print without
problems using Evince:

pdf2djvu -d 1200 2002.04049.pdf > 2002.04049-1200dpi.djvu

Converting a PDF to PDF 1.3
I also tried the DjVu trick on a different unprintable
PDF,
but it failed to print, even after lowering the resolution to 600dpi:

pdf2djvu -d 600 dow-faq_v1.1.pdf > dow-faq_v1.1-600dpi.djvu

In this case, I used a different technique and simply converted the PDF to
version 1.3 (from version 1.6 according to pdfinfo):

ps2pdf13 -r1200x1200 dow-faq_v1.1.pdf dow-faq_v1.1-1200dpi.pdf

This eliminates the problematic transparency and rasterizes the elements
that version 1.3 doesn't support.

27 April 2020

A few days ago KDE Apps 20.04 were released, and I am happy that thanks to the openSUSE Build Service (and a lot of scripting and some hand-work), packages for Debian Unstable and Testing are available in by repositories!
The previous location (debian-plasma at OBS) should be replaced by the following entries in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/obs-npreining-kde.list:
For Unstable:

other other apps that need rebuild, currently only digikam (but that in the latest beta3 released a few days ago)

To make these repositories work out of the box, you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc.
I don t provide an apt-gettable source archive anymore, in particular since one of the Debian KDE maintainers has rejected my help and told me Go away . So it seems that this convenience is not appreciated, and necessary. The source packages are available from the OBS web sites of the respective repositories. Well, if they are not doing the work, I cannot more than offer my help. Thanks Debian!
Currently there are two packages missing: kio-extras and kdeconnect, both of which need new (hitherto unavailable) packages which I will hopefully package in the next days. Two other, juk and okular, are already at version 20.04 in Debian and co-installable.
Enjoy!

1 April 2020

Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In March, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 30h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 20h for ELTS (out of 20 max; I did 0).
Most contributors claimed vulnerabilities by performing early CVE monitoring/triaging on their own, making me question the relevance of the Front-Desk role. It could be due to a transient combination of higher hours volume and lower open vulnerabilities.
Working as a collective of hourly paid freelancers makes it more likely to work in silos, resulting in little interaction when raising workflow topics on the mailing list. Maybe we're reaching a point where regular team meetings will be benefical.
As previously mentioned, I structure my work keeping the global Debian security in mind. It can be stressful though, and I believe current communication practices may deter such initiatives.
ELTS - Wheezy

No work. ELTS has few sponsors right now and few vulnerabilities to fix, hence why I could not work on it this month. I gave back my hours at the end of the month.

4 March 2020

I have the need to restore my okular tab setup on restart, since I often have quite a lot of pdfs open to view at the same time. Unfortunately, the current okular doesn t provide this feature. There is a merge request by one of the main authors of okular, but it doesn t work for me in a stand-alone setup, that is not running KDE but only Okular. I developed a much simpler fix for the restoration problem (because most of the code is already there!), see this merge request, which although not perfect for sure does the trick for me.
I have recently updated Okular for Debian in my private repository, which maybe has triggered an update of the maintainers of Okular to update the package in the main repository, too. Thanks a lot to the maintainers for their work. But since it does not contain my own tab-restore patches, I still provide NMU versioned Okular packages in my private repo:

approved deletion of
sshpass (website screenshot)

Administration

Debian:
do the samhain dance,
ask for new local contacts at one site,
ask local admins to reset one machine,
powercycle 2 dead machines,
redirect 1 user to the support channels,
redirect 1 user to a service admin,
redirect 1 spam reporter to the right mechanisms,
investigate mail logs for a missing bug report,
ping bugs-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka and remove data,
poke cdimage-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka,
update a cron job on denis.d.o for the rename of letsencrypt.sh to dehydrated,
debug planet.d.o issue and remove stray cron job lock file,
check if ftp is used on a couple of security.d.o mirrors,
discuss storage upgrade for LeaseWeb for snapshot.d.o/deriv.d.n/etc,
investigate SSD SMART error and ignore the unknown attribute,
ask 9 users to restart their processes,
investigate apt-get update failure in nagios,
swapoff/swapon a swap file to drain it,
restart/disable some failed services,
help restore the backup server,
debug stretch /dev/log issue,

Notify the derivatives based on jessie or older that stretch is frozen

Sponsors
The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer.
All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 November 2016

Wishing every one a happy Gujarati New Year, Vikram Samvat 2073 named Kilaka and hoping the upcoming year will be yuuge for you.
These next couple of paragraphs are totally not an excuse for why it will take a few more days for me to reach seven blog posts.
Reading reports about Diwali in the American press, I see a bit of confusion whether Diwali is one day or five. Well, technically it is just one (Sunday 30th this year.) but there are a number of other observances around it which could be classed as subsidiaries if you want to look at it that way.
The season commenced last Wednesday with Rama Ekadashi. (where the Gujarati name is different I'll use that and put the Sanskrit name in parentheses.) That's a fast day and therefore not much fun.
Thursday was Vagh Barash (vyaghra dvadashi) which as the name suggests is something to do with tigers but we don't in my experience particularly do anything special that day.
Friday, things began in earnest with Dhan Terash (dhana trayodashi) when Lakshmi the Goddess of prosperity is worshipped. It is also a good day to buy gold.
Saturday was Kali Chaudash (Kali Chaturdashi or Naraka Chaturdashi) On this day many Gujarati families including mine worship their Kuladevi (patron Goddess of the family) even if She is not an aspect of Kali. (Others observe this on the Ashtami of Navaratri.) The day is also associated with the God Hanuman. Some people say it is His Jayanti (birthday) though we observe it in Chaitra (March-April.) It is also the best day for learning mantras and I initiated a couple of people including my son into a mantra I know.
Sunday was Diwali (Deepavali) proper. As a Brahmana I spent much of the day signing blessings in the account books of shopkeepers. Well, nowadays only a few old people have actual account books so usually the print out a spreadsheet and I sign that. But home is where the main action is. Lights are lit, fireworks are set off, and prayers are offered to Lakshmi. But most important of all, this is the day good boys and girls get presents. Unfortunately I have nothing interesting to report; just the usual utilitarian items of clothing. Fireworks by the way are technically illegal in New Jersey not that that ever stopped anyone from getting them. The past few years, Jersey City has attempted to compromise by allowing a big public fireworks display. Although it was nice and sunny all day, by nighttime we had torrential rain and the firework display got washed out. So I'm glad I rebelled against the system with my small cache of sparklers.
Today (or yesterday by the time this gets posted.) was the Gujarati New Years Day. There is also the commemoration of the time the God Krishna lifted up Mt Govardhan with one finger which every mandir emulates by making an annakuta or mountain of food.
Tuesday is Bhai Beeja (Yama Dvitiya in Sanskrit or Bhai Duj in Hindi) when sisters cook a meal for their brothers. My son is also going to make something (read: microwave something) for his sister.
So those are the five days of Diwali. Though many will not consider it to be truly over until this Saturday, the lucky day of Labh Pancham (Labha panchami.) And if I still haven't managed to write seven blog posts by then, there is always Deva Diwali...

Corrected a subtle bug in my django-staticfiles-dotd "staticfiles" library where the Content-Length HTTP header was calculated incorrectly in the presence of Unicode characters resulting in truncated output. (#2)

Various fixes to django-slack, a library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework:

Fixed an issue in django-hipchat, a library to easily post messages to the Hipchat group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework where the templates were not includes when installing via PyPI. (#1)

Created a quick-and-dirty tool to scrape a Squarespace blog and convert it to a PDF so I can read them on my Kindle e-reader. (tree)

Updated django-keyerror a library to post exceptions to the KeyError.com error tracking service to silence an AttributeError exception in some error-reporting edge-cases. (commit)

Suggested an improvement to the documentation for the upcoming Twitter Bootstrap version for the deprecated .hidden and .show CSS classes. (#19789)

18 February 2016

Debugging output of GUI apps
I have been hit by #643726 again.
I was happily working on a terminal while an apt upgrade was running on
another, and suddenly kbuildsycoca4 started vomiting on my command line
because I had run okular once on that terminal last tuesday.
Among the possible workarounds, one can run kdebugdialog from package
kde-runtime and check the "Disable all debug output" button.
This is the output of kdebugdialog when run on a terminal after enabling
"Disable all debug output":

Debugging output of GUI apps
I have been hit by #643726 again.
I was happily working on a terminal while an apt upgrade was running on
another, and suddenly kbuildsycoca4 started vomiting on my command line
because I had run okular once on that terminal last tuesday.
Among the possible workarounds, one can run kdebugdialog from package
kde-runtime and check the "Disable all debug output" button.
This is the output of kdebugdialog when run on a terminal after enabling
"Disable all debug output":

I have been hit by #643726 again.
I was happily working on a terminal while an apt upgrade was running on
another, and suddenly kbuildsycoca4 started vomiting on my command line
because I had run okular once on that terminal last tuesday.
Among the possible workarounds, one can run kdebugdialog from package
kde-runtime and check the "Disable all debug output" button.
This is the output of kdebugdialog when run on a terminal after enabling
"Disable all debug output":

20 July 2014

Some days ago I decided to upgrade my laptop from stable to testing.
I had tried Jessie since several months, in my husband s laptop, but that was a fresh install, and a not-so-old laptop, and we have not much software installed there.
In my netbook (Compaq Mini 110c), with stable, I already had installed Pumpa, Dianara and how-can-i-help from testing, and since the freeze is coming, I thought that I could full-upgrade and use Jessie from now on, and report my issues and help to diagnose or fix them, if possible, before the freeze.
I keep Debian stable at work for my desktop and servers (well, some of them are still in oldstable, thanks LTS team!!), and I have testing in a laptop that I use as clonezilla/drbl server (but I had issues, next week I ll put some time on them and I ll write here my findings, and report bugs, if any).
So! let s go. Here I write my experience and the issues that I found (very few! and not sure if they are bugs or configuration problems or what, I ll keep an eye on them).
The upgrade
I pointed my /etc/apt/sources.list to jessie, then apt-get update, then apt-get dist-upgrade. (With the servers I am much more careful, read the release notes, upgrade guides and so, or directly I go for a fresh install, but with my laptop, I am too lazy).
I went to bed (wow, risky LArjona!) and when I got up for going to work, the laptop was waiting for me to accept to block root from ssh access, or restart some services, and so. Ok! the upgrade resumed but I have to go to work and I wanted my laptop! Since all the packages were already downloaded, I closed the lid (double risky LArjona!) unplugged it, put everything in my bag, and catched the bus in time :)
At the bus, I opened again the lid of my laptop (crossing fingers!) and perfect, the laptop had suspended and returned back to life, and the upgrade just resumed with no problem. Wow! I love you Debian! After 15 minutes, I had to suspend again, since the bus arrived and I had to take the metro. In the metro, the upgrade resumed, and finished. I shutdown my laptop and arrive to work.
Testing testing :)
In a break for lunch, I opened my brand new laptop (the hardware is the same, but the software totally renewed, so it s brand new for me). I have to say that use xfce, with some GNOME/GTK apps installed (gedit, cheese, evince, XChat ) and some others that use Qt or are part of the KDE project (Okular, Kile, QtLinguist, Pumpa, Dianara). I don t know/care too much about desktops and tweaking my desktop: I just put the terminal and gedit in black background, Debian wallpaper is enough dark for me so ok, put the font size a bit smaller to better use my low-vertical-resolution, and that s all, I only go to configure something else if there s something that really annoys me.
My laptop booted correctly and a nice, more modern LightDM was greeting me. I logged in and everything worked ok, except some issues that follow.
Network Manager and WPA2-enterprise wireless connections
I had to reconfigure some wireless connections in Network Manager. At the University we use WPA2-enterprise, TTLS + PAP. I had stored my username and password in the connection, and network manager seemed to remember the username but not the password. No problem, I said, and I wrote it when it asked, but the Save or OK button was greyed out. I could not click it.
Then I went to edit the connections, and more or less the same, it seems that I could edit, but not save the (new) configuration. Finally, I removed the wireless connection and created it again, and everything worked as a charm.
This, I had to do it with the two wireless in my University (both of them are WPA2-enterprise TTLS + PAP). At home, I have WPA2 personal, and I had no issues, everything worked ok.
This problem is not appearing in a fresh install, since there are no old configs to keep.
Adblock Plus not working any more
I opened Iceweasel and I began to see ads in the webpages that I visited. What? I checked and Adblock plus was installed and activated I reinstalled the package xul-ext-adblock-plus and it worked again.
Strange display in programs based on Qt
When I opened Pumpa I noticed that the edges of the windows where too rough, as if it was not using a desktop theme. I asked to a friend that uses Plasma and he suggested to install qt4-qtconfig, and then, select a theme for my Qt apps. It worked like a charm, but I find strange that I didn t need it before in stable. Maybe the default xfce configuration from stable is setting a theme, and the new one is not setting it, and so, the Qt apps are left barefoot .
With qtconfig I chose a GTK+ Style GUI for my Qt apps and then, they looked similar to what I had in stable (frankly, I cannot say if it was similar or exactly the same , but I didn t find them strange as before, so I m fine).
Strange display in programs from GNOME
Well, this is not a Jessie problem, it s just that some programs adopted the new GNOME appearance, and since I m on xfce, not on GNOME, they look a bit strange (no menus integration, and so). I am not sure that I can run GNOME (fallback, classic?) in my 1 GB RAM laptop, I have to investigate if I can tweak it to use less memory, or what.
I m not very tied to xfce, and in fact it does not look so light (well, on top of it, I don t run light programs, I run Iceweasel, Icedove, Libreoffice, and some others). At work I use GNOME in my desktop, but with GNOME shell, not the fallback or classic modes, so I m thinking about giving a chance to MATE or second chance to LXDE. We ll see.
Issues when opening the lid (waking up from suspend)
This is the most strange thing I found in the migration, and the most dangerous one, I think.
As I said before, I don t tweak too much my desktop, if it works with the default configuration. I m not sure that I know the differences between suspend, hibernate, hard disks disconnections and so. When I was in stable, and I closed the lid of my laptop, it just shutdown the screen, then I heard something like the system going to suspend or whatever, and after some seconds, the harddisk and fans stop, the wireless led turns off, and the power led begins to blink. Ok. When I open the lid, then it was waking up itself (the power led stayed on, the wireless led turns on, and when I tap the touchpad or type anything, the screen was coming, with the xscreensaver asking for my password). Just sometimes, when the screen was turning on, I could see my desktop for less than a second, before xscreensaver turns the background black and asks for the password.
Now since I migrated to Jessie, I m experiencing a different behavior. When I close the lid, the laptop behaves the same. When I open the lid, the laptop behaves the same, but when I type or tap the touchpad and xscreensaver comes to ask the password, before than I can type it, the laptop just suspends again (or hibernates, I m not sure), and I have to press the power button in order to bring it back to life (then I see the xscreensaver again asking for the password, I type it, and my desktop is there, the same as I left it when I closed the lid).
Strange, isn t it?
I have tried to suspend my laptop directly from the menu, and it comes to the same state in which I have to press the power button in order to bring it back to life, but then, no xscreensaver password is required (which is double strange, IMHO).
Things I miss in Jessie
Well, until now, the only thing I miss in Jessie is the software center. I rarely use it (I love apt) but I think it makes a good job in easing the installation of programs in Debian for people coming from other operative systems (specially after smartphones and their copied software stores became popular).
I hope the maintainer can upload a new version before the freeze, and so, it enters in the release. I ll try to contact him.
Update 2014/07/20: Julian Andres Klode, maintainer of software-center, just replied (see his comment below) and pointed to GNOME Software (gnome-packagekit) as alternative. I just installed and it looks neat and nice. I m very happy!
TODO
I have a Debian stable laptop at work (this one with xfce + GNOME), I ll try to upgrade it and see if I see the same problems that I notice in mine. Then, I ll check the corresponding packages to see if there are open bugs about them, and if not, report them to their maintainers.
I have to review the wiki pages related to the Jessie Desktop theme selection, I think they wanted the wallpaper to be inside before the freeze. Maybe I can help in publicity about that, handle the votings and so. I like Joy, but it s time to change a bit, new fresh air into the room!Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, Free Software, Moving into free software

30 March 2014

Debian Edu / Skolelinux
keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
#debian-edu, with a
wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
last development phase of a new social networking concept.
I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
and as a necessary step to gain expertise.
In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
hunger.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?
I discovered the LTSP advantages
with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
running. I just loved it.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
be made of steel.
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
I found two main disadvantages.
I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
or dropped.
It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
discourage many people too.
Which free software do you use daily?
I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
Virtualbox.
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
the "R" statistical language; a
few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
first scenarios where this will happen.

13 May 2012

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
publish another interview with the people behind
Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
details get right before release.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
My name is J rgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.
My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
home since 2006.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?
Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
computers in use. I answered: "Yes".
Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
Bielefeld in December of 2006.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
for me as today.
In the past there were advantages like:

I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
they had little money to spent for computers and software.

It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
cost.

It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
server

I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
came up in this way:

Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
now.

They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.

With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa for
management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
interfaces used in the past.

It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
different needs.

The documentation is usable and gets better every day.

More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
is sharing knowledge and minds.

Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
whole municipality areas.

Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
politicians.

Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily?
I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.
My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
and the whole family. I probably forgot something.
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
countries and areas all over the world.

I ve heard from various people that an iPad is great for such meetings, and produces much less paper waste, so of course, I wanted to try with my brand new Plasma Active tablet.
Before meeting
So before meeting: Charge tablet & fetch needed documents.
Possible issues: Everything was on a my imap server. Minutes was a plain text file, Agenda was a docx file, treasures report was a xls spreadsheet, and the various other papers were pdf files.
For fetching, I ve heard a lot about Kontact Touch and everything using Akonadi. Besides me not being fully able to properly enter my password in the first 10 tries, and a sometimes flaky internet connection, everything here was a breeze.
To the three first documents, the answer was Calligra Mobile . Rendered even the docx file better than libreoffice did. And Calligra Mobile was nice and touch friendly and worked pretty well for this. There is also something called Calligra Active , which is supposed to be way cooler, but still misses at least one essential feature to be used for a touchscreen only. It can only open documents passed to it on command line. And I m not yet very comfortable with a onscreen keyboard.
For the last, there was Okular. The desktop edition of Okular. I was impressed by *how* usable Okular were for a touch screen device. A quick and dirty edition of a mobile Okular could probably be done with remove all toolbars and menubars and such and if no file is passed on command line, then open a file selector window and open selected file , which shouldn t take a person knowing the Okular code much time. But that s still just the Quick and dirty edition
During
And during the meeting, everything worked flawlessly, except the internet on site, so I was happy I had prepared in advance. As a extra bonus, Plasma Active offered the nice KDE Games, as John Layt also mentioned, for the parts of the meeting where it was a bit boring.
So. At least for me and in this case, Plasma Active did its job, at least to a A. And it is still described as Alpha software.
Issues
There is, though, a few important usability issues:
For QWidget based applications, oxygen s nice desktop feature of being able to move the application by dragging it from almost everywhere is just completely useless on a touch screen device when you are only using full screen applications. Luckily, oxygen-settings can disable this.
Update: People tells me that this has already been fixed.
The Network Manager Plasma Widget, in case of no network , is very hard to activate in order to select a network. A bit larger touch area here would be very nice. Currently, it feels like it is only slightly larger than a dot: .
Future
Oh boy, I m looking forward for Plasma Active getting to Beta or RC status. Or Final!
And btw, I m looking for a job.

27 August 2011

For a (german) talk I ll be giving soon I was interested in a list of open source projects which use Jenkins. Jenkins is a great open source continuous integration server. I was wondering whether such a list exists but since it doesn t exist yet I created my own and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of Hudson/Jenkins) suggested to blog about it. There we go.

And Cloudbees hosts some OSS projects providing Jenkins as a service.
Update [2011-08-29]: thanks for all the feedback, I ve updated the list accordingly.If you re aware of another open source project using Jenkins please leave it in the comments, I ll update the list accordingly then.

15 March 2011

Linux 2.6.38 was just released, with another big update to ASoC including:

Enhancements to multi-component from Jarkko Nikula allowing multiple devices of the same type to be included in one system (and handling other overlaps between devices) and support cross device DAPM.

Support from Dimitris Papastamos for compressing the register cache in memory using either an rbtree or LZO, giving substantial memory savings on CODECs with large register maps, especially those that are sparse. This is especially beneficial to modern devices with integrated DSPs. This can be enabled by machine drivers, though CODECs can also provide defaults.

Addition of trace points around DAPM and register I/O operation, allowing very low overhead logging without interfering with the main system log, useful for collecting verbose diagnostics without interfering with system operation and for always enabled flight recorder style tracking for intermittent problems. I blogged about ASoC trace points in more detail at the time.

Restructuring of the Samsung CPU support from Jassi Brar, including a number of really good usability improvements. This supports features of more modern CPUs such as the ability to run two audio streams to a single I2S port and includes a number of API simplifications which should also make developing drivers for Samsung systems much easier.

19 April 2010

Bravo Greenpeace Switzerland! At Nestl s annual
shareholder meeting 2010 last week, you descended from the ceiling
in the middle of the presentations with flyers and a banner asking
for the company to take responsibility for their reckless actions
in Indonesia.
Thousands of square kilometres of forest are cleared every day
so that companies like Nestl can make vast sums of money off
consumers.
Meanwhile, Orangutans outside the
venue were protesting Nestl and asking for a break (copying
Nestl s own slogan Have a Break! Have a ). The Orang Utans are
pushed towards extinction by capitalist interest.
One of my closest friends was part of the act, and he recounts
breaking into the ventilation system before sawing through the
ceiling, and descending on a rope. The police detained them for
more than 24 hours, but the message has been sent.
Bravo!
Read more (and watch videos of the spectacular descent) on the
Greenpeace webpage,
the
Greenpeace press announcement and their blog (all in
German), or on 24heures (in French).
Planetsave has
a decent coverage in English.
NP:
Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery

23 December 2009

I'm using digikam to organize my pictures I took with my D90 DSLR. I always got the impression that the View -> "Zoom to
100%" menu shows not the full sized image (100%). When using another picture viewing program like okular and choosing
View 100% there, I get a "bigger" image. Proof is here:

100% view - Okular vs. Digikam

You can see okulars view on the left in the foreground. Digikams 100% view is in the background at the right. Both apps
are showing the same JPEG picture. I don't know that Digikam is doing wrong there, but it's definitely not a 100% view
that it shows. Time for a bug report, I guess...

UPDATE:
Oh well... wondering why all those people got the Copyright-Notice.png instead of the real picture, I finally
discovered that I need to change the rewrite settings for the IPv4 vhost section as well. IPv6 users hadn't this kind of
problem. So, better use IPv6 instead of IPv4, folks! ;-)

And thanks to sgran for pointing out <vhost 1.2.3.4 2001::1:2:3:4> syntax! ;-)